Sleep difficulties are growing more and more common in the modern world. Few people in the industrialized world wake up "cleanly", that is to say instantly, fully, and comfortably. Hectic schedules, late office hours, meals grabbed at odd times . . . all of these can lead to disturbed or erratic sleep. One of the primary difficulties with unsteady sleep schedules is that waking up can be next to impossible. Alarm clocks have an inherent problem in that they activate at a predetermined time with no physiological input from the subject who is to be woken. If an alarm sounds or activates when the person is in "deep" or delta sleep, wakening will be difficult and the familiar early morning grogginess will be experienced and will persist, possibly for hours. The present invention seeks to address this problem by monitoring the physiological state of the individual and activating an alarm within a predetermined time window when it is sensed that the individual is at an optimal point, that is when they are already virtually awake. The invention plots this physiological data so that it can be used to predict these optimal points over the course of an evening, used for longer term studies in a single individual, or the same long term studies in larger populations.